A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Segmentation

TL;DR

SimZSS introduces a straightforward approach for open-vocabulary zero-shot segmentation that leverages frozen vision models and linguistic cues, achieving rapid training and state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

The paper presents a simple, effective framework that enhances zero-shot segmentation by combining frozen vision models with linguistic localization, requiring only image-caption data.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on 7 out of 8 benchmarks.

Requires only image-caption pairs for training.

Trains in less than 15 minutes on large datasets.

Abstract

Zero-shot classification capabilities naturally arise in models trained within a vision-language contrastive framework. Despite their classification prowess, these models struggle in dense tasks like zero-shot open-vocabulary segmentation. This deficiency is often attributed to the absence of localization cues in captions and the intertwined nature of the learning process, which encompasses both image representation learning and cross-modality alignment. To tackle these issues, we propose SimZSS, a Simple framework for open-vocabulary Zero-Shot Segmentation. The method is founded on two key principles: i) leveraging frozen vision-only models that exhibit spatial awareness while exclusively aligning the text encoder and ii) exploiting the discrete nature of text and linguistic knowledge to pinpoint local concepts within captions. By capitalizing on the quality of the visual representations, our method requires only image-caption pairs datasets and adapts to both small curated and large-scale noisy datasets. When trained on COCO Captions across 8 GPUs, SimZSS achieves state-of-the-art results on 7 out of 8 benchmark datasets in less than 15 minutes.